At the stroke of midnight on Thursday, aspiring writers everywhere took a deep breath. One second later, their blank screens weren’t blank any longer — for quite a while.

November 1st marks the start of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The annual fiction extravaganza will bring together more than 200,000 writers this year, first-timers and pros alike, each committed to hammer out 50,000 words of sparkling fiction over the course of the month.